Serdyukov’s New First Deputy

As rumored in mid-summer, President Medvedev announced today former KGB and FSB officer Aleksandr Sukhorukov, most recently Director of the Federal Service for the Defense Order (Rosoboronzakaz), will be First Deputy Minister of Defense.

According to ITAR-TASS, Defense Minister Serdyukov introduced the 55-year-old Sukhorukov during a working meeting with Medvedev in Stavropol.

Medvedev and Serdyukov noted Sukhorukov will be responsible for arms procurement and the beleaguered state defense order.

He’ll be sitting in the hot seat right away. Medvedev told him:

“. . . this is a very delicate process: on one side, you need to understand the realm of the Armed Forces, the field of modern military technology, on the other, you need to build relationships with suppliers correctly. But it’s not always simple to do, the current history of concluding contracts shows this.”

“Last night, RF Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s deadline for concluding all Gosoboronzakaz-2011 contracts expired. On Thursday, the media reported that this task was not completed.”

Sukhorukov takes the post vacated by Vladimir Popovkin, who took over the Russian space agency Roskosmos.

Sukhorukov was with Serdyukov at the Federal Tax Service. He followed the Serdyukov team to the Defense Ministry, becoming Deputy Director of Rosoboronzakaz in mid-2008, and Director a year later. But he kept a low public profile at that agency.

He was born November 11, 1955 in Kasli, Chelyabinsk Oblast. He graduated from the Chelyabinsk Higher Tank Command School in 1977, and later a KGB Higher School. He apparently worked for the KGB in the Armed Forces, retiring as an FSB lieutenant colonel in 1996.

From 1996 to 2004, he was deputy director, then director for the Finance Ministry’s northwest regional center for hard currency and export control. He was a deputy director and director of a territorial directorate (probably northwest again) of the Federal Service for Finance-Budget Oversight in 2004-2006.

In 2006-2007, he worked for then-Federal Tax Service Director Anatoliy Serdyukov as Chief of the Organizational-Inspectors Directorate.

In 2007, Sukhorukov followed Serdyukov to the Defense Ministry as an advisor. He became Chief (not surprisingly) of its Organizational-Inspectors Directorate. Serdyukov made reference to this directorate in his 2010 year-ender when he described how he checks on implementation of his policies.

But, in late 2007, Sukhorukov jumped ship to the government, becoming assistant to then-Prime Minister (and Serdyukov’s father-in-law) Viktor Zubkov, and then Director, Department for Control and Verification of Fulfillment of RF Government Decisions.

In the Russian context, Sukhorukov seems like someone who knows how to find out if people are getting things done, and presumably what to do to them if they’re not (shoot them, send them to work in the fresh air, or fire them). He seems very much a Putin man, an archetypal silovik.

He doesn’t, however, seem like someone who can help people figure out how to get things done. Perhaps the Defense Ministry could have used someone with not just investigative, accounting, or legal experience, but maybe with an engineering, industrial, scientific, or technical background in the OPK.

It’d be interesting to know what Sukhorukov did in the army / KGB / FSB . . . he might have been a run-of-the-mill osobist, a “special section” guy monitoring some unit’s reliability and loyalty, or helping secure its secrets. But he might have served in a defense plant, or been detailed to work in anti-corruption efforts.

2 responses to “Serdyukov’s New First Deputy”

I doubt we can expect an overnight turnaround in the problems with the GOZ (and, by extension, the GPV) when they promote the man who has been running Rosoboronzakaz for the last 2-3 years. If he couldn’t make things happen in his old job, will he be able to achieve that much more in the new one? They also sorely need a new Deputy DefMin for Financial-Economic Work, a position that’s apparrently been vacant since Vera Chistova left in Nov 2010 (!). Small wonder contracts aren’t getting funded.

Agreed. Of course, it’s often more about having a loyalist than an effective manager in the post. Sukhorukov’s predecessor Popovkin was a “free agent,” not part of Serdyukov’s tax service team.

From Moscow’s perspective, the one positive note is, for the first time in 20 years, there are debates, arguments, and complaints over GOZ implementation. In the past, it was a dead letter and no one was concerned.

In early July, they finally put Mikhail Mokretsov in Chistova’s Finance Work job. But as of yesterday, he was apparently identified by name for failing to implement electronic government in his ministry.